Pakistan army seizes militant bastion

LOI SAM, Pakistan | A two-month offensive by Pakistani forces has driven militants from a stronghold through which Taliban and al Qaeda fighters had poured into neighboring Afghanistan to attack U.S. troops, the army said Saturday.

But the operation claimed the lives of at least 95 civilians - whose deaths are a critical issue that observers here warn can only increase sympathy for the militants.

The military said its forces captured Loi Sam in the Bajur tribal region Friday after a long and bloody struggle. The town sits on a vital intersection linking the border to three neighboring Pakistani regions.

“Now we have complete control in this area from where miscreants used to go to Afghanistan, Mohmand, Dir and Swat,” army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas told reporters flown to Bajur by military helicopter. “Miscreants have been expelled or killed.”

Bajur is part of Pakistan’s tribal belt that has become the stronghold of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters waging an intensifying insurgency on both sides of the border.

The army offensive in Bajur was launched in early August, after government officials declared it a “mega-sanctuary” for militants who had set up a virtual mini-state, complete with Taliban-style courts.

U.S. officials worried about record fatalities among their forces in Afghanistan have praised the operation and said it was helping reduce violence on the Afghan side. But the Americans have not halted missile strikes on suspected militant hide-outs in other parts of Pakistan’s wild border region, despite Islamabad’s protests that the attacks violate its sovereignty.

The army said it faced stiff resistance near Loi Sam from Taliban militants reinforced by foreign fighters, including some from Afghanistan.

Maj. Gen. Tariq Khan, who commands a paramilitary force, said it still could take six months to a year to gain complete control of Bajur.

Violence and government restrictions have made it virtually impossible to verify accounts of the fighting.

Gen. Khan said a total of 1,500 suspected militants and 73 soldiers had died in the operation.

The region has been suspected as a hiding place for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, but Gen. Khan said the troops had not picked up their trail.

Gen. Khan’s count of 95 civilian deaths was the first official estimate of noncombatants killed in the fighting. He did not say whether they were killed by militants or troops, though officials have acknowledged that artillery and air strikes have devastated many residential areas.

Nearly 200,000 people have fled the fighting, many of them to rough camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Reporters driven from Khar, the region’s main town, to Loi Sam on Saturday saw devastated residential compounds, some of them connected by militant tunnels, lining both sides of the road.

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